Category: books & writing

I started writing this piece back in 2011 after my father died — with the intention of writing some stories about him, but then I started dreaming about other men I’d known – my first boyfriend, a star crossed love, a former boss, etc., and it was very different writing from other stuff I’d done. Here’s a taste — right now, this is how that work starts.

At the age of 43 I’ve found myself bereft of men. They’re dropping like flies, sneaking out fire escapes, receiving lethal injections. For a while they were everywhere with their opinions and shaving cream and dirty underwear. For a while, they were in my bed and on the couch, at the kitchen table and hanging around my stoop. Like roaches in jeans and t-shirts, they multiplied. And they disappeared like bugs do, too, all of them at once & all of a sudden, and I didn’t notice any one of them was missing until all of them were.

You know what they say: every writer has a novel in a drawer somewhere that they mean to re write. I’m pretty sure they are correct.

In honor of NaNoWriMo – during which I’m actually trying to write my 3rd book, the trifecta in the series about my marriage – I thought I should dust off that old novel in my drawer and see if anyone was interested.

& Let me tell you: pulling it out and dusting it off – metaphorically, of course, since mine was an old .doc file – is pretty painful. It took me a long while to work out that my strength as a writer wasn’t fiction, and yet… the few people who read this novel back in the day seemed to think it was okay, including one very impressive agent.

It is about an angry young woman in her 20s who lives in NYC and who meets some people and sleeps with some and is trying to sort out her sexuality and her anger and friendship and loyalty, etc. It’s a coming of age novel, transparent to me now.

For me, in particular, it stands as a kind of love letter to a New York that no longer exists, or that only exists in the memories of the folks who were there, the NYC that reveals its own past selves in park lamp lights and ads for discontinued products and places fading on the sides of buildings. It’s a New York before cell phones and 9/11 and before a long line of Republican mayors. Some of my favorite places make an appearance: the Audubon Ballroom of Washington Heights, Cafe Reggio, and, of course, the statue of Joan of Arc hidden in Riverside Park at 93rd Street.

I’ve got a piece up on Patreon that I wrote last week in response to the Kavanaugh interview, by which I’m thoroughly disgusted.

When will we get to the point where we believe women?

They say “1 in 6,” but I don’t believe them. The numbers are much, much higher.

I believe that because almost no woman I know who has been raped has pressed charges. Maybe they went to therapy. Maybe they wrote about it. But none of them – zero – reported it or pressed charges.

When or if they talk about it one or two things is true: (1) they didn’t know it was rape at the time – and maybe even don’t while they’re talking about it, and (2) it had been years since it happened.

That’s why we believe her.

Because women all know the women who were groomed, the girls raped as children, the so-called slut in high school who was raped (which was, of course, what made her a slut, because that’s how this shit works), the woman who went to an interview before or after regular business hours, the woman who went to a male friend after being raped by a boyfriend, who was then also raped by the friend (or vice versa), the woman who told her dad and who was punished for it, the woman who.

Later in the piece, I talk about what it’s like to be a woman who has not been raped.

So let me make it clear to the doubters, for the men who don’t believe, for the men who think all rape is caused by boys who are “too drunk” to hear the word “no,” who think most men are good men who don’t communicate well, and that men want to protect their mothers and daughters and wives, and for the women who think it’s something other women are bringing on themselves: Not so fast. Rape is such a common experience of women that I have spent most of my life feeling categorically different from other women because I never was.

Let me repeat that: Not having been raped makes me feel like I’m not the same as other women. The only other thing that makes me feel categorically different from other women is the desire to have children (whether or not they have) because I never wanted my own.

Aurora, the cat we found at sex camp many years ago – 2006, I think – died this past December. In my arms. We still don’t know exactly how old she was but she had to be at least 14.

I wrote this piece about her – about getting used to things – that was published in a tiny literary journal in maybe 2008, and I only read it out loud once or twice, so I thought I’d share it so more people could read it.

Once we left the room to do our workshop on gender roles and sexuality, it was hard not to look around, and the minute you look around wide-eyed in a place like that is the minute you know you can’t close your eyes for a second. We tried not to stare. Masochists and sadists, daddies and mistresses, swingers, pagans, nudists, and queers all gathered at dusk to eat smores around a bonfire. One submissive admitted to me shyly that he needed to learn how to make a smore because his mistress wanted one, and I had to admit I didn’t know how to either. Camping – at least the kind that involves trees and lakes and dirt – has never been my thing. If camping was good enough, we wouldn’t have invented houses. What I didn’t admit to him was that I’d never met a mistress before, and I had no idea if only he was supposed to call her Mistress So & So or if everyone did and I should too. I saw her later eating the tidy smore he’d made her by the fire. She was naked but for a rubber corset. It was a kind of unexpected partial nakedness; usually people are topless, not bottomless, and I wondered why you’d wear a rubber corset if you were only going to wear one thing, and then realized for some people the reason was probably obvious.

When we finally got to our vet, she told us the cat was probably very old and that we’d probably serve her best by putting her down. She had stopped eating or drinking. We took her home and got water into her by pumping it into her mouth with a syringe. Then we’d squeeze high calorie food into her mouth right from the tube. She would gargle her complaints, glugging meows of objection. It was pathetic, but it was hard not to laugh, too. She was not having it, and fought us all the way. But she was a tiny four-pound cat who should have been closer to seven pounds, so she didn’t have that much fight in her, either. We won.

I just finished reading Portrait of a Marriage, about Vita Sackville West and her husband Harold Nicholson, who were poly before there was a word for it. She was something like bi and he was something like gay, but at a time when neither of those identities were recognized and where people had little choice but to marry. But theirs wasn’t a marriage of convenience per se; they loved each other deeply and took care of each other in emotional, intellectual, and domestic ways. Much like Leonard and Virginia Woolf, they had a marriage that was more than a marriage but also maybe less than one.

So when I read a book about a couple who were born in 1892 (Vita) and 1886 (Harold) and who spent nearly 50 years together, who lived through two world wars and had two children and numerous love affairs with others, and who managed to do all that during the first half of the last century, I wonder if what my wife and I have is just a regularly anomalous but recurring exception; that two people perhaps find in each other a great love for another person that does not fit the requirements of what people think marriage should be and so change it to suit them.

What I do know is that it makes me sad that others can’t understand it, or feel sorry for us, because when I look at other’s lives I feel the same way I do when I see people so restrictively gendered, and want to take the lens of their eye and shift it a little this way or that so they can see what they can’t see now. I am still sad to see that queer people have become more straight than the other way around because so many queer couples I know assume monogamish, at the very least, as a way of living, but with different sensitivities and restrictions: one couple needs to tell each other about every flirtation or romance or sweaty encounter, and others know that a business trip or some time alone means sometimes a soul finds lovely company and their person doesn’t need to know a thing except for that. I wish straight people were easier about this stuff and so the capacity to be sexual and to be attractive and to be vulnerable and intimate and loving and caring with more than one person an absolute bonus for a marriage instead of a threat.

What a world of love we could live in and instead we put such terrific limitations on someone we love the most in the world. I’m never going to get it, not anymore, not now that I understand what is possible.

So the whole Patreon thing is exciting. I wish I’d done this year ago.

I promised that if I got a dozen followers I’d post a short piece on the Art of Aspiration & Resistance I’m working on, a manifesto of sorts, and I did and it’s up.

Here’s an excerpt:

Yet someone thought to take a time lapse of the way the light plays with the stained glass of DC’s National Cathedral. Who did that and why? Who built it and why? What happens to me when I watch, when you do? What happens in our brains, to our eyes? Do the tense lines in our faces relax, do our pets sigh nearby, do our breaths get a little deeper so we can take a minute to think or not to think, depending? What faith once did – provide beauty and aspiration and art and peace – seems to be missing from so many lives. So much faith seems to be about hate these days.

My intention, then, is to dig in, to go back to a time when I didn’t know what to do with this great desire for beauty, when I didn’t even know it was that, to dig into the other great yearnings I’ve learned how to name, for the erotic, for power, for peace, for friendship, for something I hesitate to call communion. Love, meaning, life. Once again I have no choice but to lean on Art, but Art in her most eternal form, the only real response there can ever be to despair.

Because I know how hard I’m fighting that beast and I assume others are too. How do you live with a big sensitive soul in a time when everything seems awash in ignorance and violence, with the one rolling into the other, joining forces and gaining speed? How do we build a culture that says no even as the rest is trying to kill us? And how do we stop it from killing us not just spiritually but actually?

It’s high time, and in the light of the loss of Ursula Le Guin, I decided to take this little leap off a cliff by starting an account on Patreon. I can’t let my wife have all the fun, can I?

I haven’t set up goals or rewards yet as I’m curious to hear what all of you would want from me. I *do* plan on doing a video and maybe some audio recordings – cause y’all like my voice – but mostly this will be new and different kinds of writing that I don’t do as much of because my blog is so on the trans/gender tip.

Expect pieces more like this and this and this, and maybe some fiction, maybe excerpts from the two novels I have written but never quite finished, and maybe some of a fairy tale I keep kicking around, and maybe anything I’m writing that doesn’t as easily cleave to the HB brand.

Thank you in advance. It means everything to me to have people in my life who want to read what I write and who want to support me while I do.

For me, she was more than Bowie or Prince – but no need to compare, either.

In Left Hand she taught us all about relational, relative gender by inventing characters who become sexed as a result of the person they were with, so the male King of a kingdom had, in a previous relationship, given birth to her own children.

She taught me everything we all already know about trees but have failed to imagine. In Direction of the Road, she writes as an oak tree :

If they wish to see death visibly in the world, that is their business, not mine. I will not act Eternity for them. Let them not turn to the trees for death. If that is what they want to see, let them look into one another’s eyes and see it there.

And in Earthsea she taught us about power and ethics and how to live despite everything.

She taught us what it means to only ever be a ‘bad man’ because we are women; that is, she uses the ‘bad man’ idea to explain that we are all of us people, but some of us are automatically bad at being what we are supposed to be because of gender and its caste.

Let me get out of the way that I’m one of those horrid feminists who not only works with men but who works to bring men into feminist movement. In addition to men of course being part of the problem, by act or omission, they also desperately need freeing from gender. We all do.

I’ve been wishing lately, in the midst of all of the articles and op-eds about sexual assault, that women all over the world might just publish the direct messages, chats, conversations in women’s groups, and transcripts of phone calls that have been happening for months now, the ones that start “shit this week has been triggering” and “okay the Ansari story is exactly it” and the like. But we won’t. We shouldn’t have to.

Because it’s all already out there, as Lindy West just pointed out in the NYT. So many things, so many. We have been talking amongst ourselves lately for months but we’ve also been talking about this amongst ourselves for decades (and before that, we were pointedly not discussing it but trying to keep other women away from those men, when we knew them). Women recommend these books to each other all the time and give them to each other as presents sometimes to say #metoo to teach other but also to say #yesallwomen but rarely do we give them to the men in our lives.

I suspect that most of my closest male friends have not read one book that’s explicitly feminist, and I’m what some might call a humorless feminist, so the men I’m close to are generally of the more enlightened variety. But even among them, I suspect there are very few who have read any of the books on that list or any other books by women and about women.

So guys, READ UP, would you? Almost any woman you know would be happy* to recommend one and most would even be happy to discuss it with you, but with one giant caveat:

You Can’t Be a Jerk About It.

Here’s How: (6 Easy Steps! A Listicle! Learn things about women while investing almost no time!)

Read to understand, not to disagree. No looking for the holes in the arguments.

Read it as if you were a woman. That is, try to imagine you were assigned one at birth and raised one or transitioned or whatever version of woman you can imagine yourself being most easily.

Try to remember that most of the is lit is written by white women and reflects all of the privilege and self-selection that implies.

don’t think about your sister/wife/girlfriend/mother/daughter because your relationship with them is likely already stepped in a fuckton of male privilege you probably don’t recognize. That is, you already think of them as women, which is really the root of the whole damn problem.

Tell a woman who might be willing to talk to you about it that you’re ignorant af but really want to understand how you could have grown up in a culture where you failed to notice that more than half the population is scared to say no, or hi, or to speak to men they don’t know or to men they do know except when they’re drunk or angry or men they thought they knew and trusted only to find out how wrong they were.

Also, don’t discuss it. Highlight things that confuse or perplex you and ask her to explain them. Don’t talk. Listen. Quietly. Without objection.

When you’re done, start over with a new book and maybe with a new woman (dependent on how likely you followed the previous 6 instructions).

This is how you learn things, guys, by learning things. Read books written by women in whatever genre you prefer: it’s all in there, in one form or another, in one book or another.

You might even find a new favorite writer. (Really. I actually like some male writers, no kidding, but only if I can relate to their lives.) (OK, that’s a joke. I like a lot of writers I have absolutely nothing in common with. That’s kind of the whole point of reading, to understand other people’s lives and so live in the world with compassion.)

Start now, please.

*Okay, I’m only kidding. Don’t ask a woman to volunteer for this bullshit. Find one who is willing to work with you and PAY HER to educate your ignorant ass.